Monthly Archives: October 2012

Solomon advises we should never hire a ‘fool’ or a ‘bystander’ (one who avoids commitment, connection and correction). Being sentimental in hiring or attempting to be nice to a person can back fire, and normally does. Firing a person (language we can’t use but it amounts to the same) is much worse than not hiring them. If a reputation precedes a person don’t try to be their saviour – you aren’t responsible for their lack of it.

A person is responsible for their own actions and must live with implication before any change is even possible. I fear that in robbing people of responsibility, we have robbed them of the capacity to change – by making everything but their own decisions the reason/s they are in their present predicament. Blame is happy to be moved from one thing to another, but an adult doesn’t play that circular game.

If people are held responsible then they can change, and then we can also make merciful exceptions, but where mercy is a demanded ‘right,’ the enforced norm, real change is seldom in sight. Some people’s circumstances are unreasonably dreadful but even then they need not remain the victim, because, and eventually, a victim will victimize. That is what they have been ‘taught,’ even though it is doubtful they were the willing student.

See Proverbs 26:1-12.

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Hard workers get to eat, whereas people that chase fantasies, to help them eat and live, are without sense – as well as without food. A fantasy is a false means to a desired end. Our world fuels fantasies, which in turn fuels a false appreciation of how to work and live, so as to eat.

Being made a star is a fantasy that drives people to all sorts of incorrect decisions and hopes – most of them dashed. But the same goes for gambling – a game at which an infinitesimally small number of people win at, yet they are the ones that are paraded in front of our vanities and susceptibilities so as to entice more into the fantasy. And ‘lemming-like’ we herd, follow and plunge. Go to Vegas.

And as for ‘Get rich quick schemes.’ They are as old as mankind because the attitude that fuels them has never changed. ‘I want it and I want it now.’ Delayed satisfaction, which normally brings genuine satisfaction, is disdained and overridden in these schemes. But they seldom satisfy, whereas the wealth that accumulates with time and hard work has a self-regulating ability – it is appreciated more completely because it cost a person and didn’t happen easily or swiftly. What a person gets quickly they are more likely to squander but what takes time and effort is not so quickly parted with.

‘Get rich quick’ always minimizes or deliberately bypasses the true value and nature of work – time, energy and thrift. It has the seeds of its own destruction it in because it fails to account for the self-regulating principles contained within the nature of work itself. It fosters greed and normally comes at the cost of another person’s life/money etc. So, it is also parasitic – hosting off another’s lifeblood. This ultimately makes it unethical, or a variant on the theme.

Working, and working hard, isn’t so sexy but it pays better and more consistent dividends.